Charity: Woman in a Black Dress (1865)

Gustav Dore’s large Charity: Woman in a Black Dress (1865) hangs at Lytham Hall in Lancashire; the picture above does it little justice. An evidently kind female is doling coins to impoverished children. She is all clad in sombre black which makes her face appear all the paler. Does grief for her own deceased child kindle a greater spark of sympathy for others’? Does she mourn for a fallen world which carelessly tolerates such little ones dying in the street? Alternatively, this benevolent individual wears black so as to not draw attention to herself; gay colours would have made her more noticeable among the shabby fabrics of her beneficiaries, and emphasised the gap between them.

Be kind to others, but for the best reasons.